Paper Bullets (19 page)

He sat quiet. He didn’t look like I’d pissed him off, which was good because I was clearly still having trouble controlling my own anger.

My instinct was to apologize for the outburst. I didn’t, and not only because I didn’t know if Richards had anything to do with her death. I didn’t apologize because no one else seemed angry that her life had been snuffed out. Even Stacy, who’d been Melody’s best friend, was still stuck in her grief, as I knew Ryan must be.

I had been the furthest thing possible from a friend to Melody. That distance let me move through the grief faster, but it was beginning to look like I wouldn’t move past anger until I found out who’d really killed her.

“I didn’t kill her,” Richards finally said.

“Did you get her killed? Whatever she was doing for you?”

He was staring out the front windshield. The late afternoon sun was directly in his face. I’d had to lower the visor so I could see well enough to drive, but he hadn’t moved his. When he started talking, he didn’t answer me directly.

“Sewell was a shrewd customer. Most guys like him, they think they’re slick enough they’ll never get caught, so they don’t plan ahead. Sewell, he was different. He tested the variables, calculated the odds, and he did it in a split second, so fast most people wouldn’t notice.”

I wondered if that’s what Sewell had been doing when he’d seemed to check out for a split second during our conversation after I’d implied I investigated illicit affairs. Calculating the best response given all the possible outcomes.

“I had a few meets with him, bought some pills off him, always trolling to see if I could get a bead on his supplier,” Richards said. “Just about the time I’m ready to give up and tell my handler we’ve got enough on Sewell to arrest his ass, he tells me he just got back from a vacation and guess who he ran into? My ex.”

“Gloria,” I said as I made the missing connection between Sewell and Richards.

“Yeah. I guess you know who she works for.”

I hadn’t known she was still working for Gordino, but I did now.

“Gordo’s some far-flung relative of hers,” Richards said. “Back when we were married, I wasn’t a cop yet. She was out here working at one of the casinos, learning the business, she said. I was dealing twenty-one, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. She never planned to stay out here. I thought I could change her mind, she thought she could convince me to go with her when she went back to Boca. I fucking hate snakes, and anybody who hates snakes shouldn’t live in Florida. I said no and meant it, and that was the end of us.”

He was telling me far more than he had to, but I supposed it was his way of backing into an answer he didn’t want to give.

“How did Sewell put it together?” I asked. “That you were her ex. Don’t you have a cover name?”

“That’s the beauty of it. There’s this thing in twenty-one called Five Card Charlie. This place I worked, I was one of the youngest dealers there, and most of the rest of them were women. Everybody gave me shit, started calling me Charlie. The name stuck. I had to put Lewis on the marriage license, but when Gloria met me, everybody called me Charlie, so she did too. That’s the name I go by now, Charlie Richards.”

Which explained why I hadn’t found a current credit history for Lewis Richards. If I was a betting woman, which I’m not, I would bet that almost everything he did these days was on a cash basis.

We’d reached McCarran. The woman on the bicycle was far behind us. I put on the signal and got in the left-hand turn lane to go south on McCarran, the opposite way I’d gone the day before when I took this route to Melody’s gym. Driving by the café on California had been tough enough.

If Richards noticed we weren’t going by the gym, he didn’t say. Instead he continued his part of our little mutual show and tell.

“When Sewell got back from his little vacation and told me he met my ex, I got curious. I hadn’t thought about Gloria in years. I looked her up, found out who she’s working for. Suddenly my little fish starts to look like somebody who can lead me to something big. Since I couldn’t get a handle on where he was getting the meds he was dealing, I figured, why not? I reported in through my handler, and the next thing I know, I’m being hauled in by the Feds who want to know what my connections are to the Gordino family. I thought I was fucked.”

“Instead you found yourself with a new assignment,” I said.

“They came up with the cover story that I’d been suspended for using the products I was trying to get off the street.”

The way Richards said it, I could tell that part of the cover story didn’t sit well with him.

“They cut me off from everybody but my captain. I think they got burned by somebody on the inside the last time around, somebody who made their case against Gordino disappear. They made it pretty clear I was on my own—not even my handler could know what I was really doing—and they’d cut me loose and let me fry if I fucked up.”

I could just imagine how it all must have gone down. The Feds had been embarrassed by Gordino all those years ago. Here was a local undercover cop who already had a connection with someone who might be on Gordino’s payroll. If he screwed up, he wasn’t one of theirs, so they wouldn’t have to make an uncomfortable “no comment” to the press about why they let Gordino skate. Again.

The one thing he hadn’t told me was how Melody figured in all this. All he’d said was that she’d been his informant, but he already had a connection with Sewell. What did he need her for?

“I don’t understand what all this had to do with Melody,” I said.

“She was his girlfriend,” Richards said.

CHAPTER 24

GIRLFRIEND? Melody was Justin Sewell’s
girlfriend?

If I hadn’t spent years driving with one eye on the road and the other eye imagining the world of the audiobook I was listening to, I probably would have smashed the car against one of the concrete barriers on the far side of the shoulder meant to prevent distracted drivers from sailing off the road and landing on top of one of the million-dollar Caughlin Park houses that crowded against McCarran.

I suddenly understood with perfect clarity the meaning behind three initials Samantha and her friends seemed to use all the time—
WTF
.

“Ryan proposed to Melody on Valentine’s Day,” I said to Richards. “She said yes.”

Even though Ryan didn’t tell us right away, I remembered the date pretty damn clearly. I could still hear the happiness in his voice when he told me. Why wouldn’t he be happy? He’d been in love.

“How could she be engaged to Ryan and still be Justin Sewell’s girlfriend? How is that possible?”

The question was rhetorical. I knew things like that happened all the time. Richards answered me anyway.

“She was a party girl,” he said. “I met her through Sewell. She was one of his customers.”

He didn’t mean the bank, although that might have been where she’d met him. No, Richards meant that Melody bought drugs from Sewell.

I thought back to the night when Ryan had been late picking up Samantha because he had to wait for Melody, and she’d been late. I’d assumed she was drunk, that she’d been out drinking with friends and either lost track of or didn’t care about the time. About the fact that she’d kept Ryan and Samantha waiting.

Had she been drunk that night? Or had she been stoned instead? Did Ryan even know that she took drugs?

Did he know about any of it?

Did Stacy? She’d been so vehement that Melody had never cheated on Ryan, but suddenly all the pictures on Melody’s Facebook wall, the ones without Ryan in them, made sense.

Everything made sense. The single red roses. The phone calls to the house by the man who’d hang up whenever Ryan answered the phone. The photographs of Melody. She didn’t have a stalker. She’d been having an affair.

“I couldn’t get close enough to Sewell,” Richards said. “He didn’t trust me. I was just some street dealer he needed so he could unload his stuff. The feds were pressuring me. I had to figure out a way to get what I needed. I spotted the two of them together. I tailed her, figured out where she worked, what she did.”

“And you hired her as your personal trainer,” I said.

“Yeah.” He looked down at his hands again as he flexed them, the muscles in his arms bunching beneath his skin. “She was damn good at it, too. That was her problem. She thought she was good at everything.”

“Even being a spy?”

“Something like that.”

“So,” I said, “let me get this straight. You recruited Melody to get information for you that would tie Sewell to some illegal activity that involved Gordino. How did you manage to do that?”

“She had a pretty cushy life going with your ex. She didn’t want to lose that.”

He’d blackmailed her. Threatened to take all the information he had on her to Ryan if she didn’t do what he wanted.

“You bastard,” I said.

My voice was shaking. Hell, I was wound so tight my entire body was shaking.

“I am that,” he said.

We drove more than a mile in silence. We passed an exclusive golf course on the far side of Caughlin Park. The professional office buildings clustered around Plumas and Lakeside. The sprawling, green-roofed medical complex near Talbot.

When we stopped at the lights near Meadowood Mall, I thought about turning onto Virginia Street and heading downtown so I could take Richards back to his car.

Hell, I thought about kicking him to the curb. Let him take the bus. I didn’t want to be around him for one more minute, but I had to know.

“Who killed her?” I asked.

He scrubbed at his face with his hands. “I wish to hell I knew.”

“One of Gordino’s people?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sewell?”

“I don’t fucking know!”

He glared at me, his face flushed with more than just anger, but I wasn’t about to let him off the hook.

“You were arguing with her at the gym when I showed up yesterday,” I said. “What was that about?”

For a minute I thought he wasn’t going to tell me. The idea of kicking him out of my car was starting to sound better and better.

“She’d started fucking up,” he eventually said. “Getting careless. Almost like she wanted to get caught, have some big blow up with your ex or something. I had a tracker on her car, so I followed her, trying to watch out for her, then she goes and has lunch with the guy at that place on California. So we got in an argument about it, then she shows me this key, like it’s a big prize. She says it’s the key to Sewell’s place.”

“He gave her a key?” I could see Sewell sleeping with someone like Melody, but I couldn’t see him giving anyone a key.

“You know that spy shop in midtown? She bought a kit there, this thing to make duplicate keys. I didn’t even know about it until she showed me the key, all proud of herself. She was in the middle of telling me how she planned to go to his apartment to see what she could find while he was at work, then you showed up, and she lost her shit a whole different way.”

Now I understood why. She’d thought Ryan had me following her to find out if she was screwing around on him, which she was.

I wondered if the argument she’d had with Ryan at his office had convinced her he’d thought she only had a stalker, not a secret boyfriend.

“To her, it was all a game,” Richards said. “She always got her way with men. She didn’t want to screw things up with Ryan. Your ex, he’s making good money, and I guess she liked the lifestyle. He didn’t care if she went out with her girlfriends, but with Sewell it was something different.”

Of course, it was. Sewell was a bad boy, something Ryan had never been. He’d been a jock, but he’d been a smart, motivated jock. He worked hard, played by the rules for the most part, and he was a good dad to Samantha.

If Melody had a deep, dark fascination with bad boys, life with Ryan would have become boring, no matter how much money he made or how many parties she went to without him.

“Sewell knew all about Ryan and told her he didn’t care. He would have cared if he’d found out about the rest, but I couldn’t make her understand she had to be careful,” Richards said. “That’s what I need you to understand. Why I told you all this. You didn’t start out a cop. You have no idea how dangerous a guy like Sewell can be. You need to back off before he figures out who you are. That you were connected to Melody.”

A sliver of ice ran down my spine.

Sewell knew who I was and what I did.

My private investigator’s license only had my office address, same with the check I’d written to open my bright, shiny new account, but Maxon wasn’t a common name. If Sewell was motivated enough, he could find my home address in any number of databases, from the Assessor’s Office right down to the Recorder’s Office. People called it “public information” for a reason, and a banker like Sewell would know exactly how to find it.

“I appreciate the heads up,” I said. “But it’s a little late for that.”

CHAPTER 25

INSTEAD OF DRIVING the entire McCarran loop, I doubled back to Plumas and headed toward downtown.

I needed to get in touch with Kyle, and I didn’t want to do that with Richards in the car. I needed to call Samantha and make sure she was all right. I’d left her alone for too long, especially on a day like today.

Most of all I needed to call Norton so I could tell him what I’d learned from Richards, see if he could use any of that information to get Archulette and Squires to back off Ryan. I didn’t care if it blew Richards’ undercover operation sky high. I didn’t owe him anything. His little undercover operation had already done too much damage.

I thought Richards would read me the riot act once he realized how much Sewell knew about me. He didn’t. He also didn’t tell me how stupid I’d been. He just sat in the passenger seat, staring out the windshield, probably thinking about how he was going to salvage what was left of his investigation.

I figured I had about another fifteen minutes in the car with Richards before I dropped him off. I didn’t care if he wanted to ride in silence. I intended to put the time to good use. There was a lot about the case I still didn’t know.